When you’re planning a new public website, a corporate intranet or an extranet for clients, the success of these projects depends on how well your audience interacts with the final interface design.
But it’s all too easy for people involved in the development to focus on details and lose sight of the larger user experience. That’s why it’s smart to introduce user research and usability testing early in the project lifecycle.
By testing early and often, you’re able to find out what works and what doesn’t, and then apply these insights to produce an effective interface design and better interactions for clients, the public or employees. Here are three great tools for testing the usability of your website, intranet or client extranet:
- One-on-one usability testing: The basic idea is to list the most important tasks users should be able to accomplish on your site and then watch representative users try to perform these actions on their own. If you ask a person to find a certain form on the website and they keep hitting dead ends, for example, that may indicate a problem with the site navigation or information architecture. When asking people to participate, keep the tests short — aim for about 30 minutes.You’ll learn a lot simply by watching people use the site for the first time, but you get an additional layer of insight by asking these users to think out loud during the test. It helps you understand where the interface design fails to match up with the user’s thought process. Screen-capture software with audio capabilities is a great way to record the tests for review and analysis.
- Navigation testing with Treejack: Intuitive navigation is essential for usable interface design. One efficient way to test the user-friendliness of your site navigation is through a tool called Treejack by Optimal Workshop.In essence, Treejack offers “reverse card sorting,” an updated variation on a common usability test, intended to reveal how users would understand and categorize your site content. The traditional low-tech version of reverse card sorting asks a person to sort a series of index cards with topics on them into different groups, and then give each grouping a name or category. While this one-on-one test is useful in developing information architecture, it tends to take a lot of time.Treejack tweaks and automates the process, allowing you to test your design with more people than you could in one-on-one settings. The online tool asks users to assign a series of slides to the most appropriate sections in an existing navigation structure. It’s a relatively inexpensive and efficient way to find out how users perceive your content and make sure that your site navigation is intuitive and user-centered.
- Detailed website analytics: Standard site analytics and heat maps help you understand where people are entering and exiting your site, but more advanced tools gather additional data on usability. Clicktale allows you to watch users interacting with the site, logging cursor movements as people navigate through your site. These videos are especially helpful when you have a complicated home page. When you see users scroll down, scroll back up and hover over links and navigation, it gives you a lot of qualitative feedback on your interface design, whereas standard analytics tools may only record quantitative feedback such as the number of visits.
To get the most out of these testing methods, it’s best to use them early and often during the design process, rather than waiting until you have a finished product. Early test results are more valuable because you have an opportunity to apply what you’ve learned right away and make corrections to the in-progress design. When you wait to do usability testing until the product is finished, the insights you derive are less actionable, since you’ll typically need to wait and apply them to a future iteration. Just how much user testing is enough depends on the project scale and complexity, but it’s a good idea to frontload as much of it as possible.
Learn more about developing an intuitive website, intranet or extranet by contacting Portal Solutions.
Contributor: Adam Krueger, Creative Director at Portal Solutions
